If you have ever went to a football game, whether it be college or the NFL, you just do not go for the game. You go for the whole entertainment package. You go for the tailgating experience hours before. You go to be with friends and/or family. You go for the entertainment that the stadium brings, whether it be the halftime show, the cheerleaders, the horns and whistles of the home team getting the fans ramped up in every way, shape and form. This is the game day experience. When I go to the NYC Hot Expo, I go for the whole enchilada. This Saturday and Sunday, April 22-23, 2017, I come for the party.

Welcome to the 7th Annual Lenny Awards for the best new spicy products. Some of these awards are for the best products our review teams encountered and gave the highest ratings for. Most of them are from my encounters from fiery food events, purchased online or perhaps found along the way in many journeys to and fro. The Lenny Award is named after my Father who died of Cancer on this very day back in 2010. Rather than mourn his death, I am here to celebrate his life and how he would help total strangers in need just because he could. I am trying to do the same with the Lenny Award by given something from my heart to an industry and community that I love. The Lenny is given to my favorite new products and there is no other factor involved in my choice. I don’t get a chance to try everything in due time, so some of these products might be older than 2016 when I first got a chance to try them. I have listed the names of the companies below the video that either received a Lenny Award or got an honorable mention. If you do not want to view that spoiler list, go watch the video and enjoy the moment there.

Calling all manufacturers of spicy goods! Do you want your product to be seen by 200,000 chileheads? Does a full page in Chile Pepper to showcase your products sound good? What about being included in Chile Pepper’s renewal notices? An award to prove to your peers and customers just how tasty your product is?If your answer is a resounding YES!, then you need to enter The Chile Pepper Awards competition. And the good news is that there’s still time to meet the deadline of October 21.

Gourmet Food and Music Festival Postponed Until 2017
Houston, TX | August 1, 2016: SauceFest LLC (“SauceFest”) regrets to announce that the
gourmet food and music festival’s inaugural run has been postponed until the fall of 2017. The event
was originally scheduled to take place October 22-23, 2016 on the streets of East Downtown
Houston. The festival is now tentatively scheduled for October 2017.
To ensure that SauceFest 2017 brings the heat, iBurn® is working with Houston’s own Pegstar
Concerts to deliver a music lineup that only Pegstar can deliver. The 2-day festival will also feature
gourmet food products with heat levels ranging from mild to the world’s hottest, craft beer and liquor
brands, local restaurants, cooking demonstrations, and eating competitions.

I wanted to dedicate something to my Dad being it is Father’s Day. So I went looking in the archives for the videos I made for Guapo, the Authentic Mexican Sauce. I had a lot of fun filming these videos of my friends and family trying Guapo on all kinds of things. These are just the videos I took in New York and New Jersey. This was filmed in June 2010 around Father’s Day, when my Dad who was fighting for his life in his battle against Cancer was actually doing much better after the initial chemotherapy. This was a fun set of videos we did and I wanted to share them with you. There is a small cameo of my Brother Mark, and wanted to give a shout out to him as he just had a birthday yesterday. So happy b-day Bro! I hope you enjoy the 2 videos. Happy Father’s Day to all your Dads out there!

If you are interested in Guapo, or any of their other quality authentic Mexican style sauces check out your local Whole Foods or at their website HERE.

This is the 3rd Annual Hop Sauce Festival where the concept is simple, you combine a beer tasting event with a hot sauce festival. You then add in some of the Best Jersey Shore restaurants and live musical acts and throw it right next to the beach and BAM, you got a good time for all that attend. I was at last’s years event after hearing good feedback from some of the vendors who attended the 1st year in 2014. It was a lot of fun, and if you like the idea of beautiful bikinis roaming around a hot sauce event, then you might want to take the drive over to Long Beach Island for this year’s fest.

You can just find out by going to their website, (http://www.theflaveawards.com/) to see what it is all about since I am pretty much copying and pasting their information right here. Well, mostly. The International Flavor Awards, LLC (IFA’s) in conjunction with the creators of the Summer Feast Food & Music Festival are excited to invite you to compete in the “2016 Flave Awards”. More about the Summer Feast below. The Flave Awards are brand spanking new to this industry, so new there is no pictures yet of what they look like with less than a month to go. They mention a glass trophy for all winners and ribbons for 2nd and 3rd place so at least that is something. There are over 50 categories with an introductory cost of only $50/entry, but with 1 free entry if you enter 3 categories at $150 and 2 free entries if you enter 5 categories at $250. That isn’t too bad to compete for something to put on display for customers to know you done right. Now here is the part I think you will like the most, so pay close attention to what you read next:

Wheelersburg, OH – Patter Fam Foods, a full-service sauce co-packing facility is now
approved for acidic foods manufacturing. A subsidiary of Patter Fam Sauces, LLC, it is located in the Ohio-Kentucky-West Virginia tri-state region, in the heart of some of the richest agricultural regions in the Eastern U.S.

I have been doing spicy events since 2007, so you know that while I have seen many, I have also not seen them all. So my point of view can only be compared to what I have witnessed personally. I have been to 5 Fiery Food & BBQ Shows, 5 Weekend of Fire Shows, 5-6 Bowers Chile Fests, 4-5 North Market Fiery Food Festivals in Columbus, Ohio, 3 New Orleans Shows, 3 Houston Hot Sauce Festivals, and countless other venues that tried real hard to make it work. This Expo this past weekend might have been one of the best put together event that I have been too. It only rivals those Fiery Food & BBQ Shows in Albuddahquerque, NM which pull in a large attendance over a 3 day period, but I think NYC supported the vendors more because of the amount they purchased.

The NYC Hot Sauce Expo is proud to announce the 2016 Screaming Mi Mi Award winners. With hundreds of entries the winners were selected by blind taste test by New Yorks finest and brightest in the culinary industry. The panel consisted of chefs from FOX, CBS and Food Networks, Food Critics from NYC Newspapers, Bloggers, Magazines, Hot Sauce Retailers, and some of NYC’s Top Chefs. The Screaming Mi Mi Awards have been creating a large industry buzz within the Hot Sauce Community. Past winners have received features on TV, magazines, newspapers creating a profile that has lead for their product distributed by wholesalers and national retail outlets.